README_os390.txt for version 8.1 of Vim: Vi IMproved. This readme explains how to build Vim on z/OS. Formerly called OS/390. See "README.txt" for general information about Vim. Most likely there are not many users out there using Vim on z/OS. So chances are good, that some bugs are still undiscovered. Getting the source to z/OS: ========================== First get the source code in one big tar file and ftp it a binary to z/OS. If the tar file is initially compressed with gzip (tar.gz) or bzip2 (tar.bz2) uncompress it on your PC, as this tools are (most likely) not available on the mainframe. To reduce the size of the tar file you might compress it into a zip file. On z/OS Unix you might have the command "jar" from java to uncompress a zip. Use: jar xvf Unpack the tar file on z/OS with pax -o from=ISO8859-1,to=IBM-1047 -rf vim.tar Note: The Vim source contains a few bitmaps etc which will be destroyed by this command, but these files are not needed on zOS (at least not for the console version). Compiling: ========== Vim can be compiled with or without GUI support. For 7.4 only the compilation without GUI was tested. Below is a section about compiling with X11 but this is from an earlier version of Vim. Console only: ------------- If you build VIM without X11 support, compiling and building is nearly straightforward. Change to the vim directory and do: # Don't use c89! # Allow intermixing of compiler options and files. $ export CC=cc $ export _CC_CCMODE=1 $./configure --with-features=big --without-x --enable-gui=no $ cd src $ make There may be warnings: - include files not found (libc, sys/param.h, ...) - Redeclaration of ... differs from ... -- just ignore them. $ make test This will produce lots of garbage on your screen (including error messages). Don't worry. If the test stops at one point in vim (might happen in test 11), just press :q! Expected test failures: 11: If you don't have gzip installed 24: test of backslash sequences in regexp are ASCII dependent 42: Multibyte is not supported on z/OS 55: ASCII<->EBCDIC sorting 57: ASCII<->EBCDIC sorting 58: Spell checking is not supported with EBCDIC 71: Blowfish encryption doesn't work $ make install With X11: --------- WARNING: This instruction was not tested with Vim 7.4 or later. There are two ways for building VIM with X11 support. The first way is simple and results in a big executable (~13 Mb), the second needs a few additional steps and results in a much smaller executable (~4.5 Mb). This examples assume you want Motif. The easy way: $ export CC=cc $ export _CC_CCMODE=1 $ ./configure --enable-max-features --enable-gui=motif $ cd src $ make With this VIM is linked statically with the X11 libraries. The smarter way: Make VIM as described above. Then create a file named 'link.sed' with the following content (see src/link.390): s/-lXext *//g s/-lXmu *//g s/-lXm */\/usr\/lib\/Xm.x /g s/-lX11 */\/usr\/lib\/X11.x /g s/-lXt *//g s/-lSM */\/usr\/lib\/SM.x /g s/-lICE */\/usr\/lib\/ICE.x /g Then do: $ rm vim $ make Now Vim is linked with the X11-DLLs. See the Makefile and the file link.sh on how link.sed is used.